There’s still not a sound from inside that green tent, but those are definitely Will’s boots.
“SO THEY’RE DOING IT?” Jones doesn’t sound surprised. More intrigued than anything.
“I guess,” she says, slapping at a mosquito on her thigh. She still hasn’t told Jones that she saw the three men arguing near the dinghy. She isn’t sure why, but it worries her, and she wants to keep it to herself. She did want to tell him about City Jane being in Will’s tent, though.
They’re perched at the bow of the Aurora in the late evening. Delilah isn’t sure what time it is. It could be anywhere between seven and midnight. Their feet dangle into thin air below, far from the deep water. The lake drops off to an endless pit about forty feet from shore, but if they want to go back for some reason, they can take the dinghy or jump in and swim there.
That morning, after a breakfast of fire-cooked bannock and jam and coffee made by Maggie and Louise and Esther for the crowd, Delilah and Jones had explored the island, taking Laska with them as they wandered across the rock picking wild raspberries, swimming in the small warm bay they found on the north side of the island.
They’ve been on the boat for hours, leaving the adults lolling on the beaches, sunning themselves, and dozing off while the kids napped. They made themselves ham sandwiches down below for dinner. Things are just getting started on the beach.
“Do you think she likes him?” Jones’s arm is so close to Delilah’s she can feel the heat of the day radiating off him. They are still in their swimsuits after diving off the boat an hour or so before. They each have a glass of tonic with a splash of gin and three lemon wedges. It’s warm, and Delilah couldn’t stand the taste, but she added two spoonfuls of white sugar to hers, and it’s a little better.
“I think so,” she says, and takes a small sip. Jones taps the side of the boat absently with his heel, the muscle in his leg shifting with each tap. Delilah has a strange, sudden urge to place her hand on his thigh, run it down the cord of muscle. She takes another sip. “I don’t know if he likes her, though.”
“But they’re doing it,” Jones says, as though this were proof that he does. He’s looking at her, his eyes seaweed green.
“Yeah. But still. I don’t know.”
“I think he likes her,” he says.
“How can you tell?”
He shrugs his thin shoulders. “She’s pretty. For an old person. Why wouldn’t he?”
Delilah rolls this over in her mind. “Is pretty all that matters?” she asks.
She knows it isn’t. She knows lots of couples where the woman isn’t the prettiest person in the world. But she also knows it helps. A lot. She’s not sure where that leaves her when it comes to things like this.
“No,” Jones says. “But you have to think the person’s pretty. Like, even ugly people usually have someone who thinks they’re pretty.”
Delilah knocks back the rest of her drink and sets the cup on the deck. “Jones?”
He taps his foot again, lost in thought. “Yeah?”
“Do you think I’m pretty?”
He stops tapping. She holds her breath until her lungs ache, heart tripping under her ribs.
“Yeah, I guess,” he says, looking down at his drink.
A smile spreads through her. She doesn’t say anything. Jones resumes his tapping. They sit there, “Bobby McGee” drifting over the water toward them from the fire, the adults joining in on the chorus as she and Jones rock gently on the deck in the starless twilight.
AUGUST
SEASCAPE ARTIST’S COLONY
AUGUST 12, 1977
Little bird. Still not a peep from you.
The colony here is so wonderful I can hardly even put it into words. I hope one day you will find your people the way I have found mine. I just want to hug them all. I paint every day here. I’m surrounded by rolling fields, streams, mountains . . . how could I not be inspired?
I guess you received my birthday package. I’m sure it must have arrived by now. Don’t open the wrapped gift until your birthday, but there’s a T-shirt in there for you too. I hope you like it. It’s a silkscreen of a painting I did of the most incredible redwood I saw while walking in the forest with a dear friend. We stopped beneath the most towering, majestic tree I have ever seen. So humbling to feel so small, so insignificant, so young in the face of something so rooted and ancient. I wish you could have seen it. My friend said it was the biggest one he’s ever seen by far.
I wish you would call me, Delilah. Just to say hello. Think about it. I hope your breathing is okay since your hospital stay. Your dad says you’re doing better now.
All my love, Annie
“ESTHER?” DELILAH CALLS, STANDING at the back door of the Wildcat.
Esther turns from the counter where she is elbow-deep in a plastic bin of marinade, turning chunks of red meat with her hands.
“Delilah? How are you doing, kiddo? Come on in.” She shakes her hands, spraying marinade into the bin, then walks to the sink.
Delilah steps up over the crooked last step and into the small kitchen. She can see Louise chatting with a group of tourists in the front room, a pen jammed into her ponytail and a jangle of silver earrings hanging from her ears.
“What can I do you for?” Esther asks, her plump face soft and kind. She comes over and rubs Delilah’s arm. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah. Yes. I just was thinking. You know how my mom left?”
“Yes, honey. I heard she’s gone for a bit.”
“Well—”
Gary, a boy from school, walks in from the front with a handful of dishes and plunks them in the sink. He nods at Delilah and she raises a hand in acknowledgement. Esther already has a dishwasher, she thinks. Now what?
“I . . . uh . . . I was wondering if you still needed any help at all. Like when I came and helped before.”
Esther looks at her thoughtfully. “Ah. Gary, let that one soak,” she calls over Delilah’s shoulder. “That egg won’t come off unless you let it soak. Well,” she says, wiping her hands on her apron. “Let’s see here. How old are you? Twelve?”
“Thirteen in a week.”
“Thirteen in a week. That’s a bit young, to be honest, Delilah. For a real job, you know. Gary here is my nephew, so he’s helping out like you were before.”
“I know it’s young. I just thought . . . I can help out too. Like, not wait tables or anything, but I can chop things and wash dishes maybe.” She can’t keep the pleading out of her voice. She wants this job, she needs this job.
Louise comes to the counter, peels an order from her pad and slaps it down, hollering out, “Whitefish special times four, Esther. Please. Oh hey, Delilah.”
“Hey,” Delilah says.
“How’s it going? You and your dad okay? Thanks for helping out with Dusty at the Point. You ever want to babysit, just let me know.”
“Sure.” Delilah doesn’t want to babysit Dusty. She knows Louise is trying to get closer to her dad. She had noticed her making eyes at him on the boat.
Louise is wearing blue eyeshadow, and to Delilah it makes her look like a Muppet.
“Okay, well, you tell Mac, if he needs anything, I can help out. I can drop off a meal or what have you.”
“We’re fine. I can cook.”
“Of course you can, hon. What was I thinking? Well then, anything else. Tell him I said so.” Louise smiles, her lips pink and glossy as a teenager’s, and turns back to the dining room.
Esther watches Louise walk away and then turns to a bin of marinating fish fillets and places them on the hot grill.
“Tell you what. How about you come in a couple hours a day for prep. You can do the cucumbers and the carrots and peel the potatoes. Maybe help bake the bread. Come in around nine in the morning before the lunch rush. Okay?”
Relief swells through Delilah. “Yes. Thank you.”
Esther turns to look at Delilah. “You can start tomorrow. You saving up for something?”
Delilah nod
s.
“What, some makeup? New clothes for school?”
Delilah is saving up because it has occurred to her that despite the information she gave her father, he might still decide to leave. She wants to save money in case this happens. She isn’t sure what she would even do, what she could do, but she wants to be as prepared as she can.
“Yeah, I guess,” she says to Esther.
Within three days, Esther is trusting Delilah to add the spices to the moose meat chili and plate the whitefish with the little lemon spiral and the sprinkle of parsley flakes. Delilah feels like she has a real job, like she is grown up now.
She wakes up alone most mornings, Mac long gone to the mines. He is working every shift he can get his hands on. He hasn’t mentioned leaving again, and school starts in a week. She has her breakfast, usually Rice Krispies and a glass of fruit punch, and then walks down the short hill and around the corner from Weaver’s to the Wildcat. She is making two dollars an hour and working three hours a day. In a month, she will have over a hundred dollars.
ON HER THIRTEENTH BIRTHDAY, Delilah wakes up craving bacon. She must have been dreaming of it, or maybe a neighbour is cooking it. She sits up, a slow excitement creeping through her.
Thirteen. Finally.
She gets out of bed and pulls on her shorts and the glittery kitten T-shirt she ordered from a Tiger Beat magazine back in Vancouver. The house is quiet. Mac must have left for work. At dinner the night before, he hadn’t mentioned anything about it being her birthday today, but she knows he’s bluffing. For all Annie’s nonchalance about gifts, he loves giving them. In Toronto, he had pretended to forget her birthday once, and she had been almost in tears until he asked her to go out to the garage for a box of light bulbs. The lavender banana-seat bike she had wanted from the Sears catalogue was sitting there by the car. Annie told her that her dad had spent half the night assembling it.
Delilah pads through the empty house but finds no note or presents, no birthday cup of cocoa waiting for her, no cinnamon bun from the bakery uptown, her favourite treat now that Annie’s gone. She steps outside the front door, brushing the chimes aside as she walks to the edge of the porch and sits, her bare feet trailing in the dust.
Martha is sitting on a lawn chair in front of her own house, her round face turned to the sun, her cotton dress hitched up, and a beer bottle wedged between her thick legs. Charlie is pounding a board into their broken front step.
Delilah has no idea how old Martha is. Fifty? Sixty? Charlie seems old, shrunken. His shoulders cave in and the hair at his temples is grey. He wears little round glasses and stoops when he walks by with Martha on their way to Weaver’s. But Martha is a small mountain, a volcano, every part of her swollen and huge, vibrating.
There’s activity down by the waterfront. Delilah can see a few small boats on Back Bay setting out to fish. Jones is with Red on the boat, but he has said he’ll come by in the evening and they can go to Weaver’s for an ice cream sandwich.
The realization that her dad has forgotten her birthday dawns on her. Instead of feeling hurt and betrayed, she just feels tired. The weariness of having to tell him, having to deal with his horror when he remembers. All of it. He will race around the shack in his filthy work clothes trying to whip up some sad little Hamburger Helper birthday dinner while she sits there telling him it’s okay.
She wishes the Wildcat was open today so she had something to do. She could go see what Will and Jethro and Mary Ellen are up to, but she hasn’t seen Will since Lonesome Point. When Delilah thinks too much about her dad and Will, she feels a churning in her stomach that she doesn’t like, and her mind starts racing. She misses Will, is all. And she isn’t quite sure who this serious, distracted, angry version of her father is.
She plays in the dirt with her big toe now, making swirling patterns.
“Hey, girl!” Martha calls from her lawn chair.
Delilah waves, still running her toe through the soft earth.
“You got any of them Archie comics?”
Martha never returns her comics, but what can Delilah do? Say no? Not likely.
“Sure.”
She stands and heads into the shack, letting the screen door slam shut behind her. She gathers a couple of old Betty and Veronicas from under her bed and returns to the front yard. She hands them to Martha, who takes them and scrutinizes them carefully. Her arms are round and doughy, and one of them has little white circular scars scattered over her dark skin like shiny stars.
“That it? You don’t have more?”
“Can’t find any more right now. Those are good ones, though. They go on a camping trip in one and the other one has a Cheryl Blossom story in it.”
Martha turns them over and inspects the backs. “Stupid girls.” She shakes her head, but Delilah can hear the fondness Martha has for them. “Fightin’ over that boy.” She points a tobacco-stained finger at Delilah. “Boys don’t respect you if you fight over them. You know that?”
“No. I didn’t know that.”
Martha watches her warily, takes a sip of beer. Her dress is wrinkled but pretty, small yellow flowers stitched along the round collar. “You got no boy?”
Delilah shakes her head. The sun is starting to bake down on her bare legs. It must be closing in on noon. Her stomach growls ferociously.
“No?” Martha slaps the comics down on her lap. “That red-haired boy comes around here.”
Delilah flushes down to her toes. “That’s just Jones.”
“Mmm,” Martha says, cackling. “That’s just Jones.” She opens a comic and starts to read, squinting in the sunlight.
Delilah feels she has been dismissed, so she goes back into the cool shack. She walks into her messy bedroom, the dark shapes of clothing and books scattered all over the floor. She reaches under her bed to feel for the small package from her mother. She had almost thrown it out when her dad gave it to her, but something made her keep it. As if she had known it would be her only gift.
She sits with her back against the bed and opens the plain brown wrapping. There’s a letter and a T-shirt, both of which she shoves back under her bed. She unwraps the small present and finds something pink and ruffly. She shakes it out and a scented sachet with a tiny ribbon falls from the folds. It’s a sundress, dusty rose, with a tiered skirt. The top is elastic. It stretches when she pulls on it and there are two thin straps. She looks at it for a moment. Turns it over in her hands. Then she puts it aside and walks to the kitchen and opens the fridge.
There is a full pack of bacon on the shelf, plus half a tomato and a few limp leaves of lettuce. She’ll make herself a BLT. She starts to lay slices of bacon in the cast iron pan. Four would be enough, but she keeps laying them out, peeling them off and arranging them in the pan. She adds more and more, crossing them over each other in a lattice until she has used them all and they start to writhe and spit. A tear runs down her nose, skittering into the pan below. She wipes her face with the back of her hand.
When the bacon is crisp, with no bits of rubbery fat left on it, she drains it on a piece of old newspaper and places it on a plate. All twenty pieces. She doesn’t bother with the tomato or lettuce or even the bread. She sits at that table and eats it, piece by piece, until it’s gone.
She spends most of the day reading, except when she walks to Weaver’s for a bag of Popcorn Twists and a Mars bar. Martha is out front most of the day, watching Charlie and hollering for him to bring her things. They sit out there having a picnic of white bread sandwiches and beer while Tammy Wynette croons from their record player inside. When Delilah comes back from Weaver’s, she notices that Martha has tossed her comics in the dirt by her chair.
In the late afternoon, she lies on the couch, her dad’s copy of Coma beside her. The bacon and Popcorn Twists and Mars bar are churning in her stomach, and she feels almost comatose herself as she lies there in the heat, waving blackflies away.
She’s dozing when her dad comes in, ore dust covering his work clothes, his hair cramm
ed under a Northern Air hat.
“Get up,” he says, dumping his gear by the door. “Come on, get up.” He sounds frantic, like there’s a fire or an earthquake. She sits up blearily, scratching a welt on her leg. A fly must have got her when she was asleep. “What’s the matter?”
He strides across the room and kneels in front of her.
“I’m so sorry.” His face is a sheet of crumpled misery. “I was so distracted. So busy. I just . . . all the extra work I’m doing. I knew . . . last week, I knew, and then I just had a million things on my mind . . .”
This is exactly what she was worried about. She leans over and hugs him, inhales a day of mine sweat and grit. His neck is sticky from the heat.
“It’s okay,” she says.
He clings to her for a second and then releases her.
“Get up,” he says, pulling her up by her hands. “Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
He’s already in his room, banging drawers. “Birthday dinner! You don’t turn thirteen every day, kiddo. We are going out for a special dinner. And then tomorrow we are going to go buy you that ABBA record you want. And whatever else. Jeans, a book, whatever else.”
Delilah looks down at her shiny gym shorts and too-small T-shirt. She walks to her room and surveys the pink dress sitting in a rumpled pile on the floor. Will it mean she forgives Annie if she wears it? She isn’t sure, but she doesn’t think so. It will be more like taking something from Annie, something she deserves. Besides, how would Annie ever know?
She strips out of her clothes and pulls on the sundress. It drifts around her knees and smells faintly like roses. Delilah goes back to the front room and slips on her white clogs. Her dad comes out wearing a clean T-shirt and cords. “Wow! You look beautiful. Where’d you get that dress?”
She shrugs, hugging her arms across her chest.
“Have I seen it before? You look so grown up.” He’s shaking his head like he can’t quite come to terms with that dress.
“No,” she says. “I don’t think so.”
“Where do you want to go? Wildcat?”
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